Important Notice

Husain’s women occupy a peculiar place in the history of his painting: constant, yet never quite fixed, returning across decades in forms that could be monumental, withdrawn, playful or severe. Writing on Husain’s work, Geeta Kapur observes, “It is the image of the woman which predominates in his work and for the most part she has been regarded from a deferential distance.” (Geeta Kapur, “Maqbool Fida Husain: Folklore and Fiesta”,... Husain’s women occupy a peculiar place in the history of his painting: constant, yet never quite fixed, returning across decades in forms that could be monumental, withdrawn, playful or severe. Writing on Husain’s work, Geeta Kapur observes, “It is the image of the woman which predominates in his work and for the most part she has been regarded from a deferential distance.” (Geeta Kapur, “Maqbool Fida Husain: Folklore and Fiesta”, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978, online) In the present lot, this sense of distance is visible in the figure’s evasive gaze, a characteristic so often seen in Husain’s paintings.
Tracing an increasingly introspective quality in Husain’s female figures from the late 1950s, Bartholomew described the figures in Husain’s works as “incurably solitary” and identified Husain’s primary concern in an art of “silence and meditation.” (Richard Bartholomew, Husain, Richard Bartholomew and Shiv Kapur, New York, 1971, p. 57) In the present lot, this quality is conveyed through the figure’s elongated proportions and evasive expression, her pale, almost sculptural presence set against a vigorously worked ground of turquoise, brown and black. The long fall of the hair and the extended arm establish a strong vertical rhythm, while the dark strokes across the face and torso bring a sense of movement to the otherwise carefully contained figure. Against this animated surface, the raised hand introduces a finer movement, its long fingers delicately holding the slender quill.
The quill recalls Husain’s longstanding engagement with the written word. His early fluency in Urdu brought him into contact with poetry and calligraphy; he studied Kufic khat for its geometric possibilities and made nighras using paper and pen. Poetry remained with him throughout his life, and he later wrote in both Urdu and English, returning to memories of India in verse. In the present work, the quill sits within his history of the written line, bringing together an object from Husain’s literary world with the female figure that remained so central to his painting.

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